The Fantasy Football Librarianranks the purveyors of 2008 fantasy football projections. One thing I noticed is that no one set of rankings appeared consistently near the top of the lists for the various positions. This tells me that none of these services really know anything more than the others. It's almost certainly dominated by luck.

What I'd look for is a projection system to consistently rank above-average (not necessarily #1 or near #1) in multiple positions and in multiple years. Then I'd believe that someone actually knows anything about projecting fantasy performance. I'll have more to say about this in the near future.

This post from Tom Tango made me think about the escalating athlete salaries. I don't begrudge anyone making as much money as he can, but there's something going on here that doesn't get a lot of attention. Most stadiums and arenas are built with public tax dollars, and even the privately built ones are built with very heavy subsidies and tax breaks. Teams then lease these facilities for zero dollars or fractions of what they would pay in the open market. Team owners are able to do this because of the not so thinly veiled threat of moving to another city. So the operating expenses of these teams are millions and millions of dollars less than they otherwise should be.

Money is always fungible, but I would suspect that most of this money is freed to be used in team payroll. If cities weren't giving billion dollar stadiums to teams for free, the teams wouldn't have $25 million/year lying around to pay someone to swat at a ball with a stick. Star athletes would be willing to play for far less. Alex Rodriguez would be perfectly willing to play baseball for $100,000/year if he had no better offers. What else would he do, be a personal trainer? The other $24,900,000 is what's known as "economic rent." So if you're troubled by skyrocketing athlete salaries, look no further than your city council or state legislature.

Kotite's Corner suggests a new QB rating system that considers essentially the same things as the NFL's but adds rushing, and improves the weighting by using how well each stat correlates with winning.

@BBurkeESPN

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